


a bet about us

by twoif



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 15:45:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8377963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/twoif
Summary: Kuroko and Kagami, down on the west coast.

  Give me this man, you imagine saying to his father, your voice strong like black coffee and salt and the California sun. I promise he will make me happy. I promise that I'll let him live his own life. Just let me live mine with him.





	

You meet his father by accident in L.A. You're walking down the stairs after a shower, in Kagami's oversized t-shirt and your pajama pants, and Kagami is calling from the kitchen to ask whether you want a glass of water, when the front door opens. 

"I didn't realize Taiga had guests," says the stranger at the door.

"I didn't realize you were getting in this afternoon," Kagami says from behind you.

"I must have forgotten to send you the flight details," the man who can only be Kagami's father says, and takes off his shoes. 

Kagami is unfazed, so you pretend this is totally normal, well within your expectations that the first time you meet his father would be less than an hour after having sex. You sit at the dining table across from his father, hair dripping wet, while Kagami makes drip coffee and the two of them talk in English about the flight, his father's current project in Seattle, Kagami's rehab on his knee. "You must be Taiga's teammate from high school," his father says at one point, switching into Japanese, barely looking over you as he blows on his coffee, which he takes black. Kagami, on the other hand, dumps milk into two cups before passing one to you. 

"Visiting for a conference," Kagami grunts, which is true, but the conference was in San Diego and you took an extra week of vacation to fly up to L.A. "Translation," Kagami adds, like he's lost all his fluency in Japanese and can only explain this much, which is probably the case.

"Nice to meet you," you tell him. 

"Same," his father says, not _thank you for always looking after my son_ , because, you guess, it's been years since he's been in Japan and Kagami must have gotten it from somewhere.

"Is your father always like this?" you ask Kagami later, when the two of you are sitting by a skate park and he is wolfing down a hamburger, which he promises you is just a snack before dinner. 

"Like what?" he says through a mouthful of food.

_Like he doesn't think much of me_ , you want to say, but instead you look him straight in the eye and shrug, a gesture that you learned from him and always delights him when you perform it. "He's not much like you," you say. 

"I guess the height is all him," he says absently, "and the eyebrows, but everyone says I take after my mom."

Later, you think you were probably lying. His father is just like him, the Kagami in your first year of high school, the boy king you had promised with dirt under your fingernails to seat on the throne. Aloof, always watching out for sudden movements or a sign that you didn't want him, like a cat that you bring into a strange home and hope for love. Older, shoulders less broad, with the economical movements of an adult used to board rooms and elevators, but the same furrowed eyebrows, the same mouth set in a line. You would have walked on eggshells with Kagami too, but you were both bad with subtlety back then. He's mellowed as he gotten older; you, more prone to playing your emotions close to your chest.

"What are you thinking about?" Kagami asks, pinning you gently to the bed.

"You," you tell him, and stretch up for a kiss.

 

 

Hardly a day later, Kagami announces to his father that the two of you are going to drive to San Francisco. "Sounds fine," his father says, muting the TV. You are at the kitchen sink, rinsing the plates before you put them in the dishwasher. Kagami's hip is pressed close to your side, and you are too embarrassed to look up and meet his father's eyes. "When are you getting back?"

"Whenever," Kagami says. "Maybe a few days. You have the keys to lock up?"

"Yes," his father says, and turns the volume back up.

You sit downstairs, stiff and uncomfortable, on the loveseat opposite Kagami's father as Kagami putters around upstairs packing. He asks you simple questions, mostly about Kagami — do you talk to him often, do you see him when he goes back to Tokyo, what do you think about his basketball. Your answers are wooden, robotic, perfectly correct: _on occasion, every time he comes back we try to meet up, he has always been one of the best players I've ever seen_. The first time Kagami had met your parents, he'd been so nervous that he'd blurted out _please entrust Kuroko to me_ instead of _I have always been in Kuroko's care._ Everyone had laughed about it, including you, your face so hot you thought for sure the skin would peel away from the muscle, and Kagami had spent that afternoon out on the veranda with your grandmother, who had taken to him like he was the second grandchild she'd always wanted, constantly offering him candy and peeled mandarin oranges. This was after the Winter Cup your first year, and in the two years following, he came home with you often, even cooking dinner for your family once or twice. When Kagami had left for the states after graduation, it had been your grandmother, surprisingly, who had asked you if you'd be lonely. She had been the only one to ask, and you, unprepared, had said, "I expected it to go this way," which was honest but wasn't quite an answer. She'd patted your hand and had offered you a senbei cracker, and you remember the taste of it, salt and seaweed, crumbling into dust.

Now, Kagami's father hands you a cup of tea, in a coffee mug and brewed too hot. "I didn't realize he kept in touch with anyone besides Tatsuya," he says. "Didn't one of his classmates end up here with the Lakers as well?"

It was the Clippers, and Aomine wasn't a teammate, you tell him, mouth dry.

"I see," his father says, and frowns.

Standing outside watching Kagami load your suitcase into his car, you ask, "Is it okay to leave your father alone like this?"

"We're not good at spending time together anyway," Kagami huffs. He pauses and, on a whim, makes a dunk on the hoop in his driveway before throwing the basketball into the trunk, grinning at you like a puppy expecting belly rubs for a good trick. "Don't worry about him. He's fine."

His father does not send you off as Kagami starts the engine. Kagami adjusts the rearview mirror once, but otherwise does not look back. You are the one with your eyes peeled, looking for a shadow at the front door, a face peering out from the living room windows. There's nothing. Kagami drives off.

You look over at Kagami, who has one hand hanging out of the driver side window, the sunlight catching the chain of his necklace and the metal links of his watch, which you know was a gift from his father after he was drafted. He's tanned from surfing and playing outside on rundown, half-painted streetball courts, healthy and whole and brighter than the sun. That day you sent him off to college in the states, you stood by a floor-to-ceiling window in the airport, tracking the movement of each contrail like you could read novels in each cloud-like smudge, like maybe one of those arcs would be a message from him to you, a reassurance you had been too proud to ask him for. _Don't worry. This is a promise. This is not the end_. You stared for so long you almost went blind. That's why you cried, you told your mother when you got home and she watched you from the kitchen, silently fretting. You burned your eyes, that's all. 

 

 

Having grown up in Tokyo almost all your life, you think of road trips as short things, a matter of hours in someone's rented car, maybe a trip a co-worker takes with a boyfriend, after a train ride to somewhere more remote. "San Francisco's six hours away, but we'll take the scenic route," he says, rolling down the window so that the wind tears at his hair and into his eyes. "Maybe ten hours?" He tells you about a trip he'd taken with Himuro during the last offseason, up and down this same stretch of highway for days. Surfing in Monterey Bay, where Himuro swallowed too much water and was given CPR by four different attractive women. Los Padres Forest, where they watched a fire rip down the side of a mountain like a typhoon of smoke. Big Sur, where the water was the color of precious stone and there was a bridge that spanned an impossible distance at an impossible height. They'd seen it twice, once in the daylight and again at night, he says. "Tatsuya took up photography," Kagami explains, gesturing with a half-empty travel cup of Coke as large as his face. "Some hobby he picked up from his last girlfriend, I think." 

Where were you, you wonder, when they were blithely tearing down the coast? Waiting patiently for a call or a LINE from Kagami, probably. Counting down the days until the start of the NBA season, so that you'd have an excuse to talk to him, but only every other game, so that he wouldn't know you were tracking him. Going on half-hearted dates with quiet, well-behaved teachers or salarymen who always blinked when you told them you were once on a nationally renowned basketball team in high school. _Do you still want to play_? they'd ask doubtfully when you bring it up. _No,_ you'd reassure them, _I don't do that now_. But you would still play whenever he dropped into Tokyo, for Riko and Hyuuga's wedding or because Seirin invited him to see the new team or just an excuse, any excuse that he can fit into his schedule. Years later, you are still the sixth man, the shadow, so invisible his father can't place you against the brilliant backdrop of Himuro and Aomine. 

"What about with your father?" you ask. "Did you ever take a driving vacation with him?"

"A short one when I was in sixth grade, to Joshua Tree. But he was usually working during my summers, so I spent most of them with Himuro."

"Do you resent him?"

"My _dad_? Of course not. Why would I?"

"No reason," you say, chewing on the inside of your cheek. "It's just that it seems you've spent so much time apart."

"He's my dad, but he has his own life." Kagami props an elbow on the edge of his open window. When he leans against it, he turns his head slightly to the right so he can see you out of the corner of his eye. "Just like you and me."

"A life with you in it," you remind him. 

"I'm in it," he tells you. "Just not all the time."

"Wouldn't it be better if you saw each other more?"

"I don't know," Kagami says. Then, very slowly, "Would it?" 

It's noisy in the car with the sound of the wind, Kagami's fingers drumming against the side of the car to a song only he can hear, the occasional vehicle passing at an even higher speed, but the words stretch out between the two of you as if you are hurtling past in absolute silence. You know he is never subtle, that his Japanese is straightforward, still caught somewhere in the last years of grade school and slowly degrading with every game he plays with the Lakers, and yet you find yourself running your mind's tongue over his words, looking for hidden edges, tugging at each possibility until you run out of string. _This is the problem with you,_ Ogiwara had said the one and only time the two of you talked about middle school. _You mull over things instead of being straightforward, isn't it tiring?_ You were eating with him at a Moss Burger, a piece of bun stuck to his face, his eyes narrowed the way Aomine's used to when he was trying to figure out a math problem or the insult hidden in something you said, and you realized in that moment that you had a type, that anyone with two eyes can draw a line from him to Aomine to Kagami, and that probably everyone did. 

Like jumping on stepping stones, you trace that line in your mind, from one childhood friend to another. _Isn't it tiring not asking for what you want?_ Ogiwara might ask. _It's gross that you always keep things bottled up like that_ , Aomine would have said. _What are you thinking about?_ Kagami is always asking. _Tell me._

Outside the window, the towns roll by, each name a prayer to a god foreign to you: Santa Monica, Malibu, Camarillo, Summerland. At the conference, you'd met up with an old professor of yours who had since moved to a program in Beijing. He'd told you that the Chinese name for San Francisco was "the old gold mountain," because when they first came to San Francisco, they'd been looking for gold. What was it that you had wanted when you came to L.A. to look for Kagami? Los Angeles, _the city of angels_ , Kagami told you when he first moved there, and you'd seen him then like a divine being, on loan to you for three years, that's all. You'd used up that time with him and yet you keep holding on, panning the streams of your separate lives for the gold parts when you are together: your birthday one year, the time he was training with the Japanese national team for the summer Olympics, that horrible time two years ago when he dislocated a kneecap and almost snapped his leg and you'd flown to L.A. in a blind rush. You barely saw Kagami anyway, in between the surgeries and the rehab and the interviews with the press. His teammates had asked if you were a relative, confused by the way you and his father did a dance around him in his recovery process, never crossing paths, and mostly you remember spending afternoons at Aomine's place, letting him drag you out to bars and his favorite beaches, curling up with Kagami at night when he, finally alone, woozy with drugs and guilt, would pull you close and tell you he was sorry he couldn't play for you anymore. It was only half true, in the end; he's still playing, but it's been a long time since he was playing just for you. 

"Kagami-kun," you say. 

"What's up," Kagami answers, automatic and in English. When he turns, embarrassed to have been caught, he says, softer, "Hey, Kuroko."

Maybe you came here hoping to tie him down. You imagine telling him, _let's get married. Let's spend our lives together_. You imagine sitting across from Kagami's father in his kitchen, a mug of tea between you, saying, _I promise to always make him happy_. Kagami turning bright red, snapping, _idiot, I'm not unhappy now_. And that's the problem, you think, tugging at those strands, waiting for meaning and only coming away with the words balled inside you, tangled and snarled. _I_ am _unhappy. I_ am _unfulfilled. My life_ is _worse without you in it._ You see now where he learned to go through his life suspended in the air, needing only to touch down occasionally to put his hands on your face and check that you're still real. But you've spent too much of your life growing up alongside someone else to be left alone. Left to your own devices, you are lost, purposeless, a machine poorly programmed and left on standby.

"How much longer?" you ask. "Until we get to San Francisco."

"Still a long way," he says absently, touching his palm to the top of your head. Smoothing it down, like you're a pet or a basketball he is trying to fit into his grip, something that belongs to him. You stretch your neck, leaning into the touch, letting him flatten your bangs over your eyes. His palm passes over your eyelids. For a second it is dark, and in the dark the only thing is Kagami's voice, saying, "It's far, you know."

His hand moves away. You see the road ahead of you, winding and long. The night you'd arrived in L.A., you saw the sunset from the back of an airport taxi. The sky had been a seamless swath of color you've only ever seen in art or video games, each street lamp winking against it like a child's vision of a star falling to the ground. Maybe you had made a wish on those street lamps. Maybe that had brought you to him in L.A., then brought his father to you. 

_Maybe_ , a voice says in your head, one that sounds like Ogiwara or Aomine or just the best version of you, _maybe you should stop reading into what isn't there, and just ask for what you want._

You turn to look at him. His eyes are fixed on the road, but when his gaze flicks over your face, you feel it like the clenched fist of the L.A. heat, achingly familiar to you even in this unfamiliar place. You are thinking that you cannot read the look on his face, whether he is worried, or upset, or just happy to be here with you. You are thinking that you have time to learn, six hours or two days or the rest of your lives. 

You are thinking that maybe you will ask him, this time, for what you want. 

_Give me this man_ , you imagine saying to his father, your voice strong like black coffee and salt and the California sun. _I promise he will make me happy. I promise that I'll let him live his own life. Just let me live mine with him_. 

"Yes, I know," you say. "That's fine."

**Author's Note:**

> \- ty as always to gluedol for the beta on such a short timecrunch T^T  
> \- title from tori amos' "[a sorta fairytale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_C23JCduok)" and summary from lana del rey's "[west coast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKxuiw3iMBE)" — if you haven't guessed, 'roadtrip down the west coast' was sort of the point.  
> \- Written as part of KagaKuro Week 2016 (Day 4: leave it to me // dependence | hope).  
> \- for more pointless babbling (i'm so good for that, aren't i!) go [here](http://retrocontinuity.tumblr.com/post/152302347118/a-bet-about-us-3k-kuroko-and-kagami-down-on-the)


End file.
